The Savage Detectives (Paperback)

Description

National Bestseller

In this dazzling novel, the book that established his international reputation, Roberto Bolano tells the story of two modern-day Quixotes--the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself--on a tragicomic quest through a darkening, entropic universe: our own. "The Savage Detectives "is an exuberant, raunchy, wildly inventive, and ambitious novel from one of the greatest Latin American authors of our age.

About the Author

Roberto Bolano was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953. He grew up in Chile and Mexico City, where he was a founder of the Infrarealist poetry movement. His first full-length novel, "The Savage Detectives", received the Herralde Prize and the Romulo Gallegos Prize when it appeared in 1998. Roberto Bolano died in Blanes, Spain, at the age of fifty.

Natasha Wimmer is a translator who has worked on Roberto Bolano's "2666", for which she was awarded the PEN Translation prize in 2009, and "The Savage Detectives". She lives in New York.

Praise For…

"An utterly unique achievement--a modern epic rich in character and event. . . . [He is] the most important writer to emerge from Latin America since García Márquez."--San Francisco Chronicle

"My favorite writer . . . The Savage Detectives is an ark bearing all the strange salvage of poetry and youth from catastrophes past and those yet to come."--Nicole Krauss, author of The History of Love

"The Savage Detectives is deeply satisfying. . . . Bolaño's book throws down a great, clunking, formal gauntlet to his readers' conventional expectations. . . . A very good novel."--Thomas McGonigle, Los Angeles Times

"One of the most respected and influential writers of [his] generation . . . At once funny and vaguely, pervasively, frightening."--John Banville, The Nation

"A bizarre and mesmerizing novel . . . It's a lustful story--lust for sex, lust for self, lust for the written word."--Esquire

"Combustible . . . A glittering, tumbling diamond of a book . . . When you are done with this book, you will believe there is no engine more powerful than the human voice."--Emily Carter Roiphe, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)